Windows 8 to ship without DVD, Blu-ray support

While it’s technically a regression, and while it will surely make those of us who remember having to install DVD support on Linux from third-party repositories smile, it’s still a major change and a sign of things to come: Windows 8 will ship without support for DVD and Blu-ray playback.

Back in the day, you had to manually enable DVD playback after installing Linux. Distributions based out of the US were unable to include the required libdvdcss (or libdvdcss2), so users had to manually install the package afterwards. Smaller distributions, or those based outside of the US, were more liberal with including libdvdcss. The end result was loads of articles on the web detailing how to enable DVD playback support on Linux. It was a ritual of some sort.

In a way, it’s kind of poetic justice that Windows users will now have to jump through the same hoops. To cut costs, and since its use was declining anyway, Windows 8 will ship without support for DVD and Blu-ray playback. To enable it, you have to buy/install Windows Media Center, or rely on one of the many third party solutions. The same also applies to support for DBV-T/S, ISDB-S/T, DMBH, and ATSC.

“Globally, DVD sales have declined significantly year over year and Blu-ray on PCs is losing momentum as well. Watching broadcast TV on PCs, while incredibly important for some of you, has also declined steadily,” Microsoft details, “These traditional media playback scenarios, optical media and broadcast TV, require a specialized set of decoders (and hardware) that cost a significant amount in royalties.”

This should reduce the cost of a Windows license, and considering Windows 8 has a tablet-focus, it makes sense not to force OEMs to pay for something tablets won’t have anyway (optical drives). It’s a good thing for me – I haven’t had an optical drive in any of my PCs for years, and I wouldn’t be surprised if the same applies to more of you. Just ask yourself: when was the last time you really used your optical drive?

It’s also a sign of something larger within Microsoft: the company has become incredibly willing to cut cruft from their operating system, even when it comes to support for hardware. This is a good sign, since if there’s one thing that’s held Microsoft and Windows back, it’s that.

As far as the entire industry goes, it’s obvious that optical media are on their way out. Apple never even supported Blu-ray to begin with, and with more and more laptops being sold without an optical drive, it only makes sense to start phasing it out. Let’s face it – it’s never been a particularly good storage medium, in terms of capacity, reliability, and speed.

Which is probably true! But like the fax for some strange reason some stuff keeps sticking around.

I remember a friend, in the 90’s, pondering if he should buy a double or quad speed cd-rom for his Windows 3.1 computer.

It was still the age of the floppy and when we heard how many floppies would fit on a single cd it was cheers all around, because an increasing number of games required disk swapping and a cd-rom negated that.

But who uses them now? They’re only used for drivers, but if you haven’t lost your cd/dvd the drivers on it are probably outdated, might as well download them right away.

And that’s the problem with them. They get lost and when you find them they may not work anymore and if they do they contain outdated stuff.

Transferring data is much easier via the network or a USB flash drive.

I have used cds and I have bought dvds, but I’ve never had the urge to buy a blu-ray player.

I do have Transformers on blu-ray, because some bloke gave it to me as he had the HD version on his hard disk anyway.

Now I’m off to the attic where I’m transferring Commodore 64 disk images to real 5.25″ floppies!

XP didn’t ship with DVD playing capability (or any MPEG2 capability), unless one bought XPMCE (Media Center Edition). Nor did previous versions of Windows. One always had to add that capability via 3rd party players (one could also pay for a 3rd party MPEG2 codec for WMP, which gave WMP the ability to play MPEG2, but not DVD).

Only with Vista did MS began bundling MPEG2/DVD functionality. I guess they’re going back to the old model. Most computers don’t even ship with DVD drives anymore, so MS doesn’t want to eat the MPEG2 licencing fees. (As a practical matter, OEMs will likely bundle DVD software players with their computers that do have DVD drives; that’s how it was for XP, Win98, etc; OEMs bundled DVD player apps, MS did not.)

Some MS fanboys on TheVerge claim that saving the license fees will drop the price of Windows 8 to the consumer, but I think MS will just take the savings and add that to their profit margin.

Some MS fanboys on TheVerge claim that saving the license fees will drop the price of Windows 8 to the consumer, but I think MS will just take the savings and add that to their profit margin.

The royalty license costs for dvd playback is about 1c per 10 copies sold IIRC, so I’d be more inclined to think that any savings would come from the lack of lawsuits over licens/patents and the EU’s finger pointing fines.

That, or Microsoft are just trying to cut down on what they’re providing to the tablet market, and maybe even more so the ARM market, so they don’t ship windows with more then it really needs. Meathod in the maddness grants them more as… DLC from Windows Store. They’ve been trying to push the anytime upgrades for a while now and with more and more gamers accepting of DLC, I’m sure it’ll just become the statu quo.

While I might agree with you if it were ONLY the codecs they were cutting by also cutting WMC this just makes it more obvious to me that the target of this OS is cell phones and NOT desktops as WMC with Internet TV was a nice feature that gives folks one more reason to do as myself, my friends and family, as well as my customers are doing right now, which is buying a nice unit so they can AVOID Windows 8.

One thing I haven’t noticed anyone commenting on though was frankly how dooky the Windows codecs really were. i mean you think the guys that developed DirectX would care a little more about GPU acceleration but frankly the default codecs are some of the absolute worst I’ve seen when it comes to hardware acceleration, just dumping everything on the CPU. That is why one of the first things I do with a Win 7 PC or laptop is go to ninite.com and install the Klite codec pack along with VLC for those funky files folks find that don’t play anywhere else. I’ve found that using DXVA on my netbook seriously cuts down the battery usage when watching movies while on the go.

Personally though I have a feeling I’m gonna be spending the next year and a half wiping win 8 for Win 7 like i spent a year and a half wiping Vista for XP. I’ve had a spare dual core in the shop running CP for the customers to play with and frankly all the feedback has been pretty negative, its just not a good OS for use with keyboard and mouse. While i agree with you this may be a way to bulk up their appstore frankly the LAST move they should be doing when they are getting badly curb stomped by Android and iOS is to gut out features that would help sell Win 8 like WMC. DVD codecs? That I can see, taking away internet TV which would have been a good reason to pick a WinTab over an Android one? NOT smart.

I take it you haven’t watched Internet TV lately? ALL the major shows and TONS of classics, all free for the user. in fact one of the easiest way to sell a customer on getting a Win 7 HP unit over a Starter one is simply firing up Internet TV and showing them all the free content. hell I’m watch Star trek TAS right now on Internet TV, forgot how fun that show was.

Sadly I think its just further proof that Ballmer wants to be the head of Apple so bad it hurts and thinks he can “monetize” all the Windows users with an appstore that charges for every single show WHILE giving them some commercials to boot. like I said i have a feeling come Nov I’ll be wiping Win 8 machines and piling up Win 8 OEM discs just as I did with Vista as it really isn’t gonna fly. Hell you have a Win 7 laptop with HDMI and Wifi you have an instant HTPC when not on the go, when I go visit my dad i’ll bring along my win 7 netbook for just that reason, as we visit we can watch some A-team or NCIS together, its really nice.

I take it you haven’t watched Internet TV lately? ALL the major shows and TONS of classics, all free for the user. in fact one of the easiest way to sell a customer on getting a Win 7 HP unit over a Starter one is simply firing up Internet TV and showing them all the free content. hell I’m watch Star trek TAS right now on Internet TV, forgot how fun that show was.

Sadly I think its just further proof that Ballmer wants to be the head of Apple so bad it hurts and thinks he can “monetize” all the Windows users with an appstore that charges for every single show WHILE giving them some commercials to boot. like I said i have a feeling come Nov I’ll be wiping Win 8 machines and piling up Win 8 OEM discs just as I did with Vista as it really isn’t gonna fly. Hell you have a Win 7 laptop with HDMI and Wifi you have an instant HTPC when not on the go, when I go visit my dad i’ll bring along my win 7 netbook for just that reason, as we visit we can watch some A-team or NCIS together, its really nice.

I couldn’t agree more in regards to internet TV (though OSNews wouldn’t let me +rep despite your comment only being 48hrs old )

Plus with Apple and their media centre, Linux with it’s plethora of media centres (not least of all the XBMC distros) and Windows now moving away from that market, I’m starting to wonder who MS are targetting:

* if people want tablets, they’ll either buy a cheap Android tablet or splash out a little more for an iPad (if you excuse the huge generalisation there). Apps are king so few people will want to go with a relatively new platform – at least not now that the market has matured.

* if people want a laptop or desktop PC then they want the full WIMP environment – not some hacky touch screen tablet OS GUI.

* and these days people are building media centres / HTPCs. XBMC have made their offering very easy to install and use. Apple have released desirable products too as well as pre-bundled suite, and even Ubuntu is soon to be getting in on the act with Ubuntu TV. Windows, however, is taking a step backwards and almost trying to exclude their customers from such features.

The more I read about the direction both Windows and OS X are heading, it makes me glad I jumped ship to Linux. Yeah the platform isn’t without it’s faults and yeah it can take longer to get a working platform depending on your distro of choice. But at least I have flexibility and freedom to use the OS the way I want to use it and without pre-imposed wall gardens introduced purely to squeeze yet more money out of software developers and consumers alike.

XP didn’t ship with DVD playing capability (or any MPEG2 capability), unless one bought XPMCE (Media Center Edition). Nor did previous versions of Windows. One always had to add that capability via 3rd party players (one could also pay for a 3rd party MPEG2 codec for WMP, which gave WMP the ability to play MPEG2, but not DVD).

Only with Vista did MS began bundling MPEG2/DVD functionality. I guess they’re going back to the old model. Most computers don’t even ship with DVD drives anymore, so MS doesn’t want to eat the MPEG2 licencing fees. (As a practical matter, OEMs will likely bundle DVD software players with their computers that do have DVD drives; that’s how it was for XP, Win98, etc; OEMs bundled DVD player apps, MS did not.)

Some MS fanboys on TheVerge claim that saving the license fees will drop the price of Windows 8 to the consumer, but I think MS will just take the savings and add that to their profit margin.

Really? What are these machines? Lame PC Gaming Ones?

Every Laptop and Desktop I see in Walmart and other places like Best Buy ship with either a Blueray or DVD drive, even the ones in the $300-$400 price range.

Let me know who are selling these machines with out a drive so I can tell people to stay the hell away from them.

Microsoft does that because it can. Because no matter how abused the customers are, they will stubbornly continue to pay for Windows. We get what we deserve. And Apple is not an option either, it’s even worse. When will we start thinking long-term? When will we start encouraging platforms that are open (openness guarantees that we won’t be abused again), standards compliant protocols, etc.?

You see THIS is why I really don’t care for FOSS and those that tout it don’t give me warm fuzzies either. you rail about people buying windows but you NEVER ask the more important question which is WHY? Why will they pay money or even steal the other guy’s OS than take yours for free?

As a retailer who won’t carry Linux allow me to answer that, its two reasons. 1.- is the same reason why WOA is gonna bomb and that is Windows x86 programs. There is nothing in FOSS that compares to Paintshop, Solidworks, Quicken/QuickBooks, Windows AA gaming, not to mention those bazillion and one programs that people have collected over the years which they love. until you can court the developers of those programs to port or make a truly seamless Wine layer that allows someone like say my dad slip in a DVD and have it “just work” then this will be a problem.

2.- Is a show stopper and why i won’t carry Linux in my shop, going so far as to sell older units with XP rather than put a brand new Linux distro and that is your driver model is HORRIBLY broken. I’m sorry but it is, its REALLY bad. I can take any distro you care to name and slap the version from say 4 years ago (which isn’t even half of a Windows support cycle) on some boxes and upgrade to current know what i get? Broken boxes! You may consider hunting forums for fixes or learning how to repair a unit that has black screened of death a fun way to spend a weekend but the consumers DO NOT and the pickiness of the driver model is so bad you will often have to “tweak” said fixes because those written for hardware A, rev B, firmware C won’t run on hardware A, rev B, firmware G and of course FOSS advocates just automatically assume that a user is gonna know enough about their EXACT hardware to even realize what is wrong and THEN have the skills to fix said problem.

So I’m sorry but FOSS is just as much to blame for the continued buying of Windows as frankly you don’t offer a functional alternative. Linux works on servers because most of the hardware is ancient (many servers still use ATI Rage for graphics output) and because the insane costs of Windows licensing makes it attractive but these are traits which are NOT common with Windows desktop! A single bad driver will eat through any savings compared to simply buying Windows Home and in fact will cost me MORE than simply buying an OEM copy of Home so until those two major glaring issues are fixed frankly you can’t complain people won’t use your product because for most its just broken. After all what good is a standards compliant OS if you spend more time fighting it than using it?

I can take any distro you care to name and slap the version from say 4 years ago (which isn’t even half of a Windows support cycle) on some boxes and upgrade to current know what i get? Broken boxes!

Okay then. How about Red Hat Enterprise Linux? Or if you’re not too thrilled about having to pay for an experiment, there’s always CentOS and Scientific Linux. If your complaint is that you can’t run a Linux distribution with flawless upgrades from version to version and for years on end, then maybe you should be looking into distributions with longer support cycles (in other words, much smaller changes). Hell, the latest Ubuntu LTS is now not only supported on servers for 5 years (up from 3 previously), it’s even supported for the same amount of time on desktops.

And what do you need to “upgrade” a Linux (or hell, any UNIX or UNIX-like) machine in the traditional DOS/Windows sense for anyway? You have the ability to flawlessly use separate partitions (and even drives) right from the start to segregate the system itself from the users’ files… use it. Linux distributions tend to come with more useful software upon installation than any version of Windows, so a Linux user might not even need to download any programs post-install. And if they do, they’re all in one place. Bonus if you’re not afraid of the command line and use a distro with dependency resolution (which would be almost all of them): Keep a list of the packages’ names that you’ll be installing and just install them all, including their dependencies, using a simple command.

Even if additional programs are needed on a new version of the distribution, if they were installed and used in the past on the system before wiping the / partition, you won’t even need to set them up again… just take care not to wipe your /home partition (back it up just in case, although I never have and haven’t had any problems). You can even “upgrade” from a 32-bit distribution to a 64-bit one or reverse, or switch distributions entirely, keeping all your programs’ settings. Most recently, I jumped from Debian to OpenSUSE to CrunchBang and the experience compared to Windows (even just reinstalling the same version of that OS in that case) is amazing. The only major exception that I can think of are system programs–things like daemons, whose configurations are written in /etc; those will need to be backed up if there are any modifications to be kept. I would say that that’s virtually no problem for a regular desktop user.

Windows “upgrades” are far from flawless themselves. Because its Setup program has always been so stubborn and dumbed down, by default making one huge partition and just dumping everything in there, and then the OS itself uses this partition for all user data as well, upgrades are a disgusting mess. The Setup program has to basically “back up” all this random crap scattered all over the place on this partition, format, and then dump it back onto the main drive–once again, all in one big system partition. Plan on using a second drive for data/files? Well, that’ll greatly simply things for yourself if you use it to put all your files on, and I don’t know they made it any better since Vista or 7, but in XP it wasn’t even worth moving “Documents and Settings” to another drive. Windows just never seemed to work right when moving user directories to another partition/drive. It just doesn’t feel like it was meant to be, and I seriously doubt more recent versions have changed that. And don’t get me started on the registry; that thing gets filthy over time in a single installation, I don’t want to see one that’s got crap from one or–gasp–more older versions of Windows festering in it.

Planning on upgrading a 32-bit Windows installation to 64-bit? Good luck with your manual backup to another drive, because the drive’s gotta be nuked. You’re gonna have to perform a completely new install, fetching and installing all the programs you want installed again, and set them all back up just the way you like them.

According to the article linked to below, apparently the Windows upgrade process has been made better, but I still wouldn’t do it. Maybe I just like to be running a completely fresh, new operating system upon first boot with no old crap lurking in the system itself. Also, notice that it says the in-place upgrades are unsupported by Microsoft. I just thought I’d point out that interesting little bit. The upgrade from Windows XP to Vista or 7 is in no way a problem-free operation, and I know from experience neither were previous versions up to XP.

Oh, and fun fact. I once ran into fun little disaster of a bug after completely wiping my mom’s Compaq computer and then upgrading the fresh, clean install to XP SP3. After all those hours, finally getting it set up, the reboot required to get Service Pack 3 up and running sent the machine into an infinite reboot cycle. It turns out, this was one of those affected OEM releases that doesn’t like AMD processors. The fix? Downloading and running some program BEFORE installing SP3. So yes, I had to reinstall XP–AGAIN–from scratch, another few hours wasted, just to get it back up and running with SP3 installed, and reinstall all those programs and drivers I already installed. And the irony of this? This was no major, Windows XP to Vista upgrade or something… this was basically Windows XP SP2 to SP3… a “minor” upgrade.

On another computer, I remember my network card working fine in the original XP retail version, then sometime after installing a service pack or two, I started getting blue screens of death whenever the network was used heavily (BitTorrent). This driver problem was finally fixed by SP2, when I could finally download torrents once again without worrying about constant BSODs.

In conclusion… once again… Windows is in no way flawless at upgrades. Windows XP SP3 managed to f*** up a brand new install all on its own, an install that was only up and running for maybe a half-hour at the most and not even used yet for real work (just getting set up for use). That’s quite an accomplishment.

“So I’m sorry but FOSS is just as much to blame for the continued buying of Windows as frankly you don’t offer a functional alternative.”

Complete and utter bullshit.

I have Linux installed on many systems, and it works perfectly out of the box on all of them.

Easy-to-use great desktop software, great desktop applications support, even if they do have funny names and are not called Photoshop.

Going from one extreme to the other is equally as ridiculous. Some people have a great experience with linux. For others it’s horrid at best. Some people have a great experience with Windows. For others it’s horrid at best.

I stand by what I said earlier. Pick the OS that best suits your needs and understand that no matter what you choose, your mileage my vary.

…When will we start thinking long-term? When will we start encouraging platforms that are open (openness guarantees that we won’t be abused again), standards compliant protocols, etc.?

I’d like to know when people will start thinking period? There must be something in the water, evidenced by what people seem willing to put up with nowadays from big corporations. I guess few raise their noses from their smart phone screens long enough to notice that the fox is making off with the chickens.

MS want’s to save on MPEG2 license fees, but what about the “new” H.264 license fees? No way MS will pay Motorola 4 billion dollars a year to license their H.264 patents, so it wouldn’t surprise me if MS dropped H.264 support, at least in Germany (the nation where Windows is currently banned unless MS pays Motorola’s demands), so the user will have to download an H.264 codec on their own.

Unless Windows 8 is dramatically cheaper than windows 7 then i think this is going to have a negative effect. Generally people get their version of windows OEM when they purchase a laptop. If DVD’s don’t work out of the box or if windows prompts them to enter their credit card to play DVD’s then a lot of consumers are going to be annoyed.

However the flip side is that i assume just like in the XP days that the OEMS will actually cover this and bundle DVD playing software.

However as in the title I’m surprised to see this move on what is a supported format. Mac OSX still supports DVD on their laptops without a DVD drive, i.e. plug in a dvd drive into a macbook air and it will play.

Indeed, in these cases, the OEM was paying the DVD licenses *twice*. First through Microsoft, and then through the third-party DVD playback software.

Reading between the lines of the Microsoft blog post, it looks like they proposed several alternative licensing models to the DVD patent pool — and gotten turned down. They can’t pay the license only when Windows is installed on machines with a DVD drive. They can’t pay the license only when a DVD is played back for the first time. They can’t pay the license only when other DVD playback software isn’t installed.

The only way to avoid paying the license is to strip out the functionality entirely. Which they did.

…optical media is dead anyway. You can download Blu-ray quality .mkv files and store them on an external hard drive. This is really easy and a lot less hassle than looking for that elusive disc.

True, but I’m generally very wary of using hard drives for long-term storage.

With DVD+Rs or even BluRay (though I haven’t switched yet), your drive mechanisms are separate from the data surface and you’re less likely to loose terabytes of data to that occasional unit that fails.

With hard drives, you’re including non-removable drive electronics and mechanics in every single unit, so they only become cost-effective (after planning for RAID) up around the 3TiB point.

…and that’s assuming you’re willing to deal with the stress of seeing so many “dead on arrival” or “failed after a few months” messages in customer reviews.

I’ll probably stick with DVD+R for a little while longer while I think about what it would take to make me feel safer. (And while I save up the $400+ CAD it would cost me for a pair of 3TiB drives)

No, you can’t download the Blu-Ray quality .mkv files legally in the US. So the legal solution is to obtain the optical media via netflix, redbox, ect, or stream it from legit sources. Strangely enough, that’s what most people do here.

No, you can’t download the Blu-Ray quality .mkv files legally in the US. So the legal solution is to obtain the optical media via netflix, redbox, ect, or stream it from legit sources. Strangely enough, that’s what most people do here.

Its easy to say ” Fix the Law” its much more difficult to write legislation that is fair to all parties. I do believe that people have a right to be paid for their work, if they choose to be.

The problem as I see it is that:

1) The copyright term is unjustly long.

2) Companies who hold copyright want to be paid more than the market will bear, which creates a black market ( pirating).

The first problem could theoretically be fixed by legislation ( although every time its come up, our laws have been changed to *increase* copyright term).

The second cannot be fixed with legislation or technology, and if, by some miracle we fix the first problem, its just going to make the second problem worse ( with shorter copyright the industries will want to charge more while they can).

Please get off your high horse and stop beating the piracy drum. Not everyone lives in the U.S. or really gives a shit what kind of laws you have over there. I’m sorry but that’s just the way it is. For a lot of other countries it’s perfectly legal to download Blu-ray quality media so my original comment stands firm.

With the death of DVD it is only a matter of time before Blu-ray and other optical media formats die. Good riddance!

Please get off your high horse and stop beating the piracy drum. Not everyone lives in the U.S. or really gives a shit what kind of laws you have over there. I’m sorry but that’s just the way it is. For a lot of other countries it’s perfectly legal to download Blu-ray quality media so my original comment stands firm.

With the death of DVD it is only a matter of time before Blu-ray and other optical media formats die. Good riddance!

Well f–king said too.

/me takes his optical drives off from his computers and throws them to the trash.

My post wasn’t a lecture on piracy, it was just an honest explanation on what people in the US do, which explains that optical media is not dead, and will not die for a while ( until a number of companys offer streaming with a complete selection of movies for a reasonable price, the equivalent of itunes and amazon music prices ( $0.99).

I’ve just set up a high-end desktop PC and have dragged out my LG combo drive (writes CDs and DVDs, can read CDs, DVDs, HD-DVDs and Blu-Ray) that cost me 67 pounds a few years ago – it was in my previous PC. It’s the only optical drive I bother with, despite some custom PC builders in the UK *insisting* you buy a crappy DVD+RW drive when you config your machine!

I mainly use my LG drive for either ripping my DVDs (and a few Blu-Rays I have) or booting a Linux distro if I don’t have a spare USB key to hand. I don’t actually use the drive to *watch* DVDs or Blu-Rays directly – why bother when you can rip it once and keep the optical media strictly as a backup?

I don’t think DVD/Blu-Ray is quite dead yet – it’s a shame they don’t just sell the movies on USB sticks now rather than the rather slow and archaic optical media. But I guess everything’s going online now, so even the time for USB sticks (tried for a while as a replacement for CD singles in the UK, but never caught on) is over now too.

A lot of the alternatives posters are suggesting are illegal (not that they should be). I can’t imagine Microsoft is shipping Windows 8 without MPEG2/4/H264/AVC, which is likely the vast majority of the license costs for DVD and Blueray playback. Maybe Microsoft has a video store they plan on launching with Windows 8 and this is some way to encourage users to rent/buy videos directly from Microsoft.

A lot of the alternatives posters are suggesting are illegal (not that they should be). I can’t imagine Microsoft is shipping Windows 8 without MPEG2/4/H264/AVC, which is likely the vast majority of the license costs for DVD and Blueray playback. Maybe Microsoft has a video store they plan on launching with Windows 8 and this is some way to encourage users to rent/buy videos directly from Microsoft.

One alternative that is completely legal would be for Microsoft to ship WebM and Ogg Vorbis multimedia support.

Everyone on the planet (including Microsoft) is granted a perpetual, irrevocable and zero cost license to use these for any purpose whatsoever.

I still have use for the DVD player on my laptop myself, since that’s pretty much my only source of legally purchased music and videos (digital distribution happens to suck quite a lot when you have irregular internet connectivity and reject the dangerously outdated credit card system)

Plus, it’s also good for testing OSs, until everyone supports USB booting and all computers with no or broken support for it have gone to trash.

Just ask yourself: when was the last time you really used your optical drive?

A couple days ago to rescue my Fedora install after PreUpgrade choked on a Qt package.

As someone else mentioned, I use mine for ripping CDs I’ve bought, and I also use it to burn CDs to listen to in my car.

I still use mine for backups of files, mostly pictures and video footage, and although I really need a better way its now at least two DVDs worth every month of additional content, the price of bluray is still far too expensive for me to justify it.

Just ask yourself: when was the last time you really used your optical drive?

A week ago, not that this change in Windows will effect me. Even when I do use Windows (not often, as I’m primarily a Mac guy) I used VLC for dvd playback. I really couldn’t care less if windows has built-in support for these formats or not, since I never used windows media center to begin with. My primary use for my optical drive, as odd as it may seem these days, is to rip audiobooks from cd; I do this because none of the download services allow me to download audiobooks in the quality I like and, as with most things, if you want something done right you just have to do it yourself. I somehow don’t think Microsoft’s decision here is going to affect that use case whatsoever.

I actually used my optical drives this year, but not as often as I used to. My floppy drive is solely for “messing” with the bios, when the motherboard forgets how to read from FAT32-formatted USB-sticks.

Windows 8 can still read dvds in explorer, it’s only the media centre that won’t be able to play back DVD films, but when you buy a pc you get free software for doing this anyway, so who cares whether you can do it in media centre?

“The end result was loads of articles on the web detailing how to enable DVD playback support on Linux. It was a ritual of some sort.”

XP didn’t had DVD support out of the box either, but there was never a need for tutorials or rituals. There were codecs packs and third party players (open source, freeware or proprietary) all installable with a few clicks.

Why the community spent hours writing articles on ubuntuguide.org detailing how to get DVD support (and patented codec support) instead of writing a script in 4 minutes is beyond me. But nooo, we have to make them jump through hoops to show them how bad DRM and patented formats are.

Do you know WHY blu-ray on PC is declining? Because it’s a pain in the ass. Two weeks ago, my Game of Thrones blu rays arrived, and I couldn’t play them in Windows Media Player, VLC, Media Player Classic, or even the OEM packaged Blu Ray player software (fuck you, Roxio, you’ve hurt me for the last time). I had to download the trial version of Power DVD to play them. If I ever mean to watch them on my PC again, I’ll have to buy Power DVD, and the blu-ray version is up over $80.

I use my optical drive all the time, actually, and I wouldn’t take kindly to having to whip out my credit card first thing after installing Windows. I also work in computer repair, and the number of people who already bring their laptops in with DVD playback issues (most of them lack the power to Google effectively), I can only imagine the strife it will cause if they can’t play back DVDs without paying extra. I’m already thinking of the malware cleanups I’ll have to do because people have blindly installed some “free DVD playback” software.

Now how about the take the final step by removing Protected Media Path and other obnoxious things Vista introduced? Hey, after all… they *are* trying to slim this OS down to run on tablets, right? Install that shit on people’s machines who choose to install the DVD/Blu-Ray codecs in the form of Windows Media Center. Cut the shit for those that don’t want it.

I’m not sure what the current numbers show but I’m betting lack of DVD support in “Windows” won’t change the number of people using their computers to watch movies. Most will be using an earlier version of Windows for years to come.

I have been reading the comments here and I can see how some people are defending MS for their decision “XP didn’t have it either”, “not a big deal”, you can just install a virus pa…I mean a codec pack….

Yes, yes I agree that is indeed very simple but what makes me upset is the principle being used. An upgrade should *not* take features away. There is NO excuse for taking features away, period. Perhaps, a feature can be disabled so it does not take resources or whatever but definitely shout be there. A perfect example for this would be the telnet client. It was enabled by default in XP but in Windows 7 (and may be Vista, don’t know) it is not enabled and you have to go to Programs and Features to enable it.

Ironic people saying that and MS pulling support in Win8 when just yesterday I put together a DVD of a Opera Performance for the performers using Windows Movie Maker on Windows 7.

Quite a handy piece of software for quick non complicated edits. DVD and BluRay are still handy formats to distribute video media to people with the least fuss. As for format restrictions with commercial content on BluRay, fn stupid and a real PITA.

Still IÂ´d use Slysoft AnyDVD HD and VideoLan anyday before using PowerDVD or other playback solutions. And yes, I playback my movies from my main PC at home for entertainment.

As for my use of my optical disc drive, I do use it mainly to rip my CDs, and to install software (which is rare; I do still buy tax software each year on discs, out of habit more than anything else). I can’t remember the last time I watched a DVD on a computer.

Usually I don’t buy whole new computers, but just upgrade what I have in place. So I still have an optical drive. I’m not sure if it works though. I don’t think I’ve even used it since I put in the new motherboard two years ago. I think it works…

I am curious about how many people have one and how often they use it.

<p>I use mine pretty often as I’m the only “tech literate” person in my apt building and the neighbors have figured out I’m easy to bribe with smokes and food (mmmm..fresh home cooked burgers or homemade pizza..mmm) so they bring me their CDs to rip to their players. I have also been selling a lot of the small under dash MP3 car stereos which they then of course have me rip their tunes to SD cards so they can use. Then there is my own personal use, scratch CDs for my band, DVD backups of my downloads folder, or burning copies of DVDs for my mom so she’ll not obliterate the original (Keep that damned weiner dog away from the discs ma!) and finally I’ll often have to update an MMO for one of the nephews and i’ll slap the updates on DVD because their Internet connection has slow DLoad speeds.</p>

So I’d say I use my DVD burners more than most (got a pair on my main machine, one on my nettop, the only machine sans DVD is my netbook) so I’d say there is still a use. Damned shame HP quit making Lightscribe though as when they run out I’m gonna miss ’em, so much nicer than drawing with a marker IMHO.

Windows XP didn’t have support for DVD burning or playing either. Since most of the (non-techie) people I know are still running XP, when they upgrade to Windows 8 (or 9 or whichever version is current then) they won’t notice the difference.

There was some moaning and groaning when Steve Jobs decided years ago that Apple would begin phasing out support for optical Drives. It is clear now that what we have is another “Steve Jobs was right” moment.

There was some moaning and groaning when Steve Jobs decided years ago that Apple would begin phasing out support for optical Drives. It is clear now that what we have is another “Steve Jobs was right” moment.

Um, no. I still watch DVDs regularly on my PC (Netflix FTW). So dead or not, Steve Jobs can go get fucked.

UZ64, you do realize that most of your Windows rants don’t hold much water, right? Rants are pretty much worthless when you ignore the fact that the issue(s) can be pretty easily resolved.

Also, as much you just stroked your linux penis just now, you also realize a lot of users have a different experience entirely, right?

It’s silly when people puff their OS chest out. Some users have a great experience with linux and a crap experience with Windows. Some users have a great experience Windows and a crap experience with linux. The ‘OS debate’ can be summed up simply with ‘choose the os that best suits your needs, and know that regardless of what you go with, YMMV’.

I am always renting Blu-Ray discs to watch movies. I think it’s a pain to go for MKVs around the internet with downloads averaging 2 to 10 GiBs. So Blu-Ray here is set to be useful on its commercial form.

CD and DVDs are really on their way out as a PC storage, specially DVD which is more of a hassle to read/write. And because of that Blu-Ray on PC is doomed before even catch. Non-optical media has been much more reliable and faster.

We’ll only be left with commercial Audio CDs and Blu-Ray discs. The rest will be hard disks and flash drives.

Well I still have a dvd/cd rw drive, watch DVD movies sometimes etc. But as I use Linux which is much better than Windows of course, this news just makes me smile. As well as creating another Vista, Microsoft are alienating so many of their customers I predict Linux and MacOS will be getting a fair number of extra users.

My wife & I often grab a DVD from our collection and watch it on her laptop – both at home and on the road. (And yes, I’m still adding DVDs to that collection. There’s zero BlueRay discs in that collection too.)

I backed up a bunch of data on my work laptop to DVD just a couple weeks ago.

At work we build servers for our systems that go to clients; a lot of the software installed comes on DVD.

So are DVD’s dead? Not by a long shot.

Would I put a DVD drive in a new laptop/desktop/server? Certainly.

Is DVD Media (e.g. DVD Video) dead? Not by a long shot either; it’s more popular than ever.

My wife & I often grab a DVD from our collection and watch it on her laptop – both at home and on the road. (And yes, I’m still adding DVDs to that collection. There’s zero BlueRay discs in that collection too.)

I backed up a bunch of data on my work laptop to DVD just a couple weeks ago.

At work we build servers for our systems that go to clients; a lot of the software installed comes on DVD.

There will always be people (in this case, you) who are slow to migrate to newer/better/faster options that are already common-place, or will be soon. The fact that you still use DVDs in various ways doesn’t say anything about the vast amounts of people who’ve already moved on and abandoned the outdated technology.

So are DVD’s dead? Not by a long shot.

Would I put a DVD drive in a new laptop/desktop/server? Certainly.

DVDs still have some life left to cling to as long as enough people like yourself are willing to throw your money at it. But, they are no longer the preferred storage/delivery media they once were. Enter thumb drives & digital downloads.

Is DVD Media (e.g. DVD Video) dead? Not by a long shot either; it’s more popular than ever.

You’re absolutely wrong here. It’s not exactly a secret DVD sales have been on a steep decline for some time so why you would think otherwise is beyond me. Streaming online services are booming, of course. While the DVD media tit isn’t totally dry yet, there ain’t much milk left.

Sorry to break the bad news but DVDs in 2012 are absolutely without question on their way out. Arguing the contrary reminds me of the people who weren’t ready to accept that cassettes were out and CDs were in.